Friday, August 01, 2014

Well dearest readers, I know that I have been giving you quite a few recipes recently. I blame it on my short visit to Greece and the inspiration from all the delicious food we ate there. Which is where I got this delicious recipe.

Let Me Set The Scene

It was our last night in Greece, the air was balmy and the sunset was beautiful with dusky pinks and deep oranges that reflected in the petrol blue coloured sea. We looked over the rooftops towards the sea, listening to the little town settle down for the night. We sat in a rustic little restaurant called Oinomageireion- The Relishes of Urany up in Vathy, at the best table, thanks to Manolis Sp. Kypraios who had a in with the owner. It was the best night we could have had to end a lovely introduction to the magnificent culture of Greece. We drank local wine, and even sampled some of the local Ouzo.

Then we were served our starter of Baked Aubergine with Feta Cheese.

It was delicious and I knew then I had to try and re-create it. This makes enough for two people as a side dish.

You will need:

A large Aubergine/Eggplant

Olive oil

2 cloves of Garlic

40 grs of Feta Cheese.

Preheat the oven to about 200ºC in a fan assisted oven. If you have a regular oven, I’d try a little hotter, or baking this a little longer.

Slice the aubergine/eggplant in half lengthwise. Peel and slice the garlic and scatter this over the two aubergine/eggplant halves. Douse with olive oil.

Put in the middle of the oven and bake for about 20-30 minutes, until the skin of the aubergine/eggplant looks a little wrinkled and the top is golden.

Dice the feta cheese and scatter this over the top of the aubergine/eggplant halves and serve.

Re-Creating Memories

It wasn’t exactly the same as the delicious aubergine/eggplant we had at the restaurant, but it did bring back all those lovely memories. I will be making this again!

It goes really well with chicken! Its a great side dish, and I think if you wrapped this in foil it would work great on the barbecue!

I do have one more recipe I’m dying to try from my vacation, but I will leave that until next week. It’s a little heavy on the calories, and I will make it for the weekend.

I promise Monday I will post you a look at my artwork, also inspired by Greece, sorry!

Don’t forget to subscribe and comment below! I’d really love to hear if you tried it and how it went!

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Darlings! Firstly a few updates, I realised the other day that I had neglected to post the photo of the completed handbag that Ms Ester kindly gave a tutorial for, so here you go:

Secondly, I’ve been listening to a lot of music on Skype lately, and I thought it was only right to share some of my tunes. If you want to see what Mrs Egeland is listening to right now, you will find the link here, or in the link box titled My Favourite and Most Used Sites. I will try and keep it updated, so please follow to see what the “ole gal” enjoys tapping her foot to.

Getting To Cold-Brew Frappe

I told you last time that my travels were inspiring, and that is where this came from. I’m sure everyone has tried Frappe’s, heck, let’s just go ahead and thank Starbucks here.

I have, been a frequent consumer of iced coffee from the above mentioned coffee company and others, but whilst I was in Greece I drank a few from generic coffee bars and restaurants. It was there that I had a Frappe this way for the first time. Of course, my recipe is based on trial and error as I couldn’t get the secret out of our very gracious barkeep at the hotel. So its not quite perfect, but well, when that has that every stopped me from sharing!

You Will Need To Start 12 Hours Ahead

Unfortunately, that’s true. Cold brewing is easy but time consuming, however you can cheat by simply making instant coffee with cold water and stirring vigorously.

If though you are a purist then you won’t mind the wait. So the trick to cold brewing coffee is a couple of table spoons of whatever ground coffee you have available in a jug, jar or large container with cold water overnight. I had espresso coffee so I used that to make my cold-brewed coffee yesterday evening, and this is the result.

Cold-brewed coffee

1/2 cup milk of your choice

4 average sized ice cubes or 8 smaller sized ice cubes.

So now you have your cold brewed coffee, filter it and pour yourself a glass, leaving enough room for your milk.

I used my old filter coffee machine filter with a paper coffee filter to filter my coffee.

In a blender, take your ice cubes and milk and blitz them until they are about the consistency of a smoothie or thick milkshake. Add more ice if your milk isn’t thick enough.

Now you can spoon your icy milk into your cold brew coffee. I tried to pour it, big mistake! It splashed across my kitchen!

Enjoy!

In Greece the milk sat separately above the coffee, well I have no idea how they did that, but I will keep perfecting and keep you posted. This isn’t sweetened and if you want to sweeten it you might want to try a little condensed milk in with your regular milk. Of course you could just forget all about the milk and add vanilla ice cream instead, which of course is delicious and fattening. I might do that at the weekend, but for now, just as the weather here in Bergen has cooled a little I’ll stick with my icy milk.

Monday, July 28, 2014

Hello lovelies, well it’s official, I am back from my vacations. It was good to get away and relax, and its been a very inspiring vacation. Let’s hope my renewed energies bring their own reward, and help push on the other important projects like this blog for example and my novel.

The weather here in Norway has been surprisingly beautiful this year. Its been the best, warmest summer so far in 30 years, apparently. Even today, with its overcast chill, and steely coloured sky its 18º Celsius.

Today, I have a mission, because after almost three weeks away, I have a lot of laundry to do. So it seems inevitable that, that is what I will be doing today. But I also have to find homes for some of our acquisitions, like the three little blue candle holders I bought because they reminded me of Greece, or the vintage wooden rolling pin and an equally lovely vintage table mincer that we found in a second hand shop on our travels.

Well, well, but I didn’t come here to write about all of that. I wanted to share my newest breakfast recipe with you. You see, spending all that time in the beautiful Greek sunshine, with their delicious Greek food made me come home and want to try to recreate some of the recipes, to recreate the sensation of those lovely Grecian days.

Sometimes the most delicious things are the simplest to make. Unfortunately I don’t have photos of the finish product, or in fact all the ingredients. But you guys don’t need a step by step photographic how to. You are all smart enough to understand what I write.

So Here’s What You’ll Need!

Greek or Greek style yogurt.

Walnuts, chopped.

Fresh fruit of your choice.

Honey.

Whilst we were in Greece we bought some delicious local honey, which is dark and sweet. I use it on my breakfast, probably not exactly low fat but certainly delicious.

In your breakfast bowl put the fresh fruit of your choice, I cheated a little here because I haven’t had time as yet to go to the supermarket and we had tinned peaches in the cupboard so I used those.

Then spoon over the Greek, or Greek style yogurt. Its never going to as good as the yogurt in Greece, simply because of the atmosphere.

Sprinkle the chopped nuts over the yogurt and then drizzle honey over the top and enjoy.

Your Done!

I’m not sure how low calorie this is. I think though that eating fresh fruit, nuts and yogurt every morning is a healthy habit to start, and maybe honey isn’t the most slimming extra but well ask any beekeeper how to rid yourself of hay fever and they will tell you to eat the honey made of the pollen of the plant you are allergic too. Something to remember as well as the other health benefits that honey has.